They Came in Chains But their Minds Were Firm
They Came in Chains but their Minds were Firm:
Ruminating on 400 Years of African American History
“If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile traditions, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world…” Dr. Carter G. Woodson
In this advanced-cybernetic society where the transfer of knowledge reigns supreme, African Americans seek to make the nation acknowledge and commemorate 400 years of African American History in these United States. How true the old adage,” prosperity breeds social amnesia.”
This 400-year sojourn began August 25, 1619, when a Dutch Slaver named White Lion sailed into Port comfort (Hampton) Virginia with “twenty and odd” negroes. The Dutchmen traded the chained Africans for food, water, and other provisions. In so doing, the English colonists began one of the most sordid phases in human history, that is, African “chattel slavery”. It is marked by two hundred forty-six years of a people’s forced free-labor and one hundred years of Jim Crow legal racial discrimination.
As the commemoration of the 400 years occurs in various ways and venues across America, it is at once triumphant and bitters-sweet. Triumphant in that the ancestors did not lose their total minds during the Middle -passage and subsequent years on plantations of the upper and lower South where their numbers abounded, although African enslavement was not confined to the South. Bitter-sweet in the sense that African American labor, genius, and martial heroics have enabled the United States of America to become the wealthiest nation in modern history.
The great African America scholar-activist W.E.B. Dubois in one of his numerous masterpieces, The Gift of Black Folk pondered: “What would America be without her Negro people?” In short, African Americans became the syncopation of the American socioeconomic structure. Yet, their story remains the greatest untold story individually and collectively in this knowledge-based and transfer-technology oriented economic system. Despite being the second pioneer group, despite fighting in every military conflict, despite being builders, horticulturalists, creative cultural, technological and scientific innovators, African Americans are not included in American history textbooks. Despite this 400-year tenure, African Americans remain the poorest segment of the populace, excluding native Americans. According to recent economic data pertaining to the nation’s wealth-gap, whites have approximately $171,000 and African Americans have $17,000 in median wealth respectively.
The African American saga represents a protracted struggle to affirm the divinity of humanity. Listen, in many instances, the Ancestors came off the plantations more civilized than their enslavers! James Baldwin has written in The Fire Next Time the following: “… to accept one’s past- one’s history- is not the same as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it…”.
This history that began in Virginia is a cogently compelling story about a people who were buried in chattel enslavement but refused to stay in the grave of oppression, repression, and suppression. We celebrate and commemorate the 400-year tenure because we took our pain and fed white supremacy sweet potato pies, fried chicken, okra, collard greens, peach cobbler, and banana pudding. And then, kept walking in Montgomery and marching in Selma. Great good getting up in the morning!
We honor the 400-year tenure and the ancestors, because they withstood the whip and inferior schools and gave the world:
Crispus Attucks, the first to give his life to establish the Republic of America, Dr. Ernest Just, Dr. Charles Drew, Dr. Walter McAfee, Dr. Katherine Johnson, Dr. Howard Thurman, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, Dr. Martin L. King, Jr., Mary McLeod Bethune, Rosa Parks, Dr. Percy Julian, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, Dr. Anna Julia Cooper, Dr. Booker T. Washington, Madam C. J. Walker, S. D. Lyons, Margaret Walker, Dr. Ralph Bunche, NASA Mathematician, Clyde Foster, Edith Sampson, Dr. Booker T. Washington, Toni Morrison, Charles Foster who fought in the battle of Queens (Charlotte, NC) and the list is never-ending.
And then, the 400 years are being commemorated as a testament to that something-ness that was in the Ancestors that bore fruition through the creative expression of gospel, spirituals, the blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, dance, rap and hip-hop, etc. Their messengers have pleased the world. They have often been imitated but never duplicated. Some of the messengers were: Thomas Dorsey, Louis “Satchmo Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Paul Robeson, Marion Anderson, Roland Hayes, Aretha Franklin, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Gerald Wilson, Mahalia Jackson, James Baldwin, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis,Michael Jackson, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and the legacy continues in today’s artists.
Careful analysis of the African American story will reveal that the 450,000 Africans that were brought to North America in chains became 4 million during the antebellum period, never stopped their struggle for freedom, justice, equality, economic parity, and full citizenship. The African American population has been proven to be long-distance runners in the on-going quest for democracy, economic development, and equity, and parity. I believe the noted novelist, John Oliver Killens, spoke to the African American experience best as follows: “… struggle and frustration is the temporary harvest of all men who want to change society fundamentally… “
The Day of Healing Ceremony will be held on August 25, 2019, at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia. African Americans and people of goodwill will pour libation and ring bells in remembrance of this stupendous sojourn, pray to the Creator of US all, and commit to making this nation a better place for all of US. Will you be in the number?
Dr. Benjamin Foster, Jr. is a recipient of the Distinguished Service Award presented by the 400 Years African American History Commemoration Commission and a member of the African American Studies Program faculty at Central Connecticut State University. He is Convenor of the Institute for Cross-Cultural Awareness and Transformative Education (ICUTE).
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